Pulling a Career 180° [originally published on LevoLeague.com]
Learning anything new, although exponentially more functional, always ends up being a love story. Infatuation is born from knowing that the thing you want to learn had a history long before you even thought to seek it out.
I graduated in 2011 with a Master’s in Civil Engineering and a Bachelor’s in Architecture. I did it all: the Ivy League thing, the study abroad thing, the travel the world thing, the live and experience anything and everything in your 20′s thing. I hung on my wall representations of years of theoretical education. And then I found out everything I had loved about architecture, and everything I was passionate about suddenly became my worst nightmare. I found myself expecting to find wisdom about life through floor plans and building sections. And predictably, in my own small way, I failed. At 25, I suddenly realized I was trapped in my ignorance that happiness came from lived wisdom rather than discovery through doubt.
A year later, I decided to take my unfortunate realization that I was an amateur human and use it to my advantage. While the people I graduated with went to their 95′s and seemed satisfied with a passive existence, I ended my track to becoming a licensed architect and instead turned my design, photography, painting, and socializing habits into a source of income. I became the creative director at a small design firm and spent the next few months learning out loud to coordinate my mind and hands and eyes. I read and talked and sat at cafés — and listened, really listened to everything.
With the knowledge that my parents were the definition of supportive, that nothing was off limits and no price was too high, I registered for a three-week Ruby course. I walked into the first class wanting to add an experience to my roster of experiences and walked out driven to the brink of exasperation over the possibilities. I had fallen in love with Ruby. The person that ended up teaching me programming for the next nine months introduced into my life the electrifying gains and frustrations of walking blind through a world which was not made with me in mind, and ultimately mentoring me through the idea that similar to architecture, through programming there are near endless ways to speak and create, where it extends far beyond the content of what is being said.
My graceless fumbling and nuance while navigating this new world, in which I had no previous training, was not easy. I hesitated and stuttered through the code, to the point where the thought of staying in love was too daunting to ever be a realistic possibility, but determination is a powerful thing.
I was told Ruby would change my life. Little did I know at the time how right that statement would be. I became fully invested in the culture and the rhythmic cadence of figuring problems out. I started attending numerous tech events and meeting a tremendous amount of new people.
In February 2013, I got my first job as a developer and was once again reminded that being a developer wasn’t much different from what had made me fall in love with architecture when I was a kid, both just being a useful byproduct of figuring things out.
There’s something profoundly humbling about taking a different route and ultimately wanting to be happy, even when I was continuously told to stop “experimenting and learning new skills” and just work at what I got my degree in. I was constantly staring before a vast expanse of self-doubt, and not so methodically came out the other end, successful but also happy.
Preexisting clarity can at times become a limiting thing. I’ve been asked if given the chance, would I do it differently. Do I think that time and energy was wasted after investing so much into becoming an architect, only to learn that my investment was all for naught? Absolutely not. Who I am as a person and as a developer today, is the sum of my experiences… architecture and all.
Knowledge is never not applicable to the work that you will do. The foundation was laid and then it was iterated on. Through trial and error I was left with a powerful combination of strengths and assets. It’s easy to become influenced by talks of “the way things should be done,” and other abstract perceptions such as data or other people’s good advice. But self realization is a delicate phase of where you end up is as much about strategy as it is about falling and staying in love.
